Local tie to Obama's "biggest fan"

A Washington Post profile of Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod features a Troy-based attorney named Robert Swidler, who is Axelrod’s childhood friend. From the story:

Robert Swidler, now a lawyer in Troy, N.Y., is Axelrod’s oldest friend. They grew up together in Stuyvesant Town, a vast community of high-rise, red-brick apartment houses just north of the East Village in Lower Manhattan. They went off to kindergarten together at Public School 40 on East 19th Street, went through Junior High 104 across the street and won admission to Stuyvesant High School, an academically selective public school, three blocks away.

Swidler recalls how, as 13-year-olds, they set up a card table, first at the Bronx Zoo, then on busy 57th Street, to sell buttons and bumper stickers for Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. Their politics were established even then, Swidler recalls — New York liberals with an idealistic bent who thought government should help the weakest members of society.